prophets

LET THE FUTURE DECIDE

Prediction, Competition, and the Rise of Social Markets in Web 3.0

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it.

Ray Bradbury

As the surface area of our information landscape expands, our institutions' ability to compress its complexity collapses toward zero. This calls for a new kind of information architecture. Decentralised, disaggregated, able to surface true and useful signal. Built from what has worked before (markets as weighing machines) and a novel approach to prediction-making (event maps) and social gamification (social markets).

Whatever you believe is the most pressing issue facing modern democracies today, the mechanism by which we diagnose, coordinate and deploy against it is in disrepair. That is the first-order problem. In the spirit of Bradbury: we shall not try to prevent the future. We can only endeavour to build a different one.

Who is it that we should listen to?

Web 2.0 answeredWhoever is most engaging.

Prophets answersThose who can best predict the future.

01
01

problemas it stands

  1. 1

    Every society is tasked with a single crucial evolutionary question. Who is it that we should listen to?

  2. 2

    We have created an information ecosystem whose response to that question has been disastrous. We listen to whoever is most engaging.

  3. 3

    In its wake, the internet has collapsed all value and meaning-making into a single, hyper-compressed marketplace. One whose only currency is attention. This poses an existential threat to liberal democracy.

Engagement is the ecosystem's only quantitative indicator. It rewards bad behaviour while saying nothing about the utility of a claim. So a democracy that senses it is slipping backwards has no way of asking, let alone answering, the question it needs to course-correct.

The more any quantitative indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures.Campbell's Law
02
02

diagnosisfour factors

What we call disinformation, polarisation, click-bait and audience capture are second-order effects. Underneath them are four generational shifts, all happening at once, all sitting beneath politics rather than downstream of it.

A · Information systemsDeath of the Blue Church

Top-down relays managed complexity from the 1870s to the early 2000s. The internet flattened the relay. Now every rower shouts commands, and the architecture that inoculated societies against bad ideas is gone.

B · EconomicsCollapse of the Nash equilibrium

Outlets once held each other to a shared approximation of reality. One broke ranks for ideological narrative, the rest followed, and the business became a race to the bottom of the ideological brainstem.

C · Psycho-biologyParasite stress response

Brains treat ideological antigens like biological ones. Destabilising memes trigger collectivist and authoritarian retreat, which is why answering bad speech with good speech so often makes things worse.

D · Game theoryAttention capture end game

Chaos through compression, as every sector is forced into one attention market, and information flattening, where genocide sits beside a cat video. The exits are dissociation or paranoia.

(A + B + C) + D = complexity catastrophe. The local variables are changing faster than we can adapt.

03
03

mechanismcompetition plus prediction

A competition-derived index organises entities through competition under shared rules. Sports leagues, chess ratings, the Fortune 500. Indexes like these create competence hierarchies, and competence hierarchies create durable signal. The PGA turns “who is the best golfer in the world?” from an argument into an answer.

Social media already runs this machine. It just indexes the most competent engagers. Point the same machine at the one capacity that can be checked against reality, and you get a different kind of signal entirely.

competition→index→competence hierarchy→prediction

qualitative into quantitative

Predictors need not agree on epistemic truth, only on a third-party validator. Any qualitative claim can be recapitulated into a falsifiable one, which forces the speaker to put something at risk.

Old internet

“Covid is nothing more than the flu.” “I disagree.” Nobody resolves. Nobody pays.

Prophets

“Net mortality this year rises 30% over the five-year average.” Resolves 31 December. Someone is wrong, on the record.

04
04

productwhat gets built

An event map is a series of if/then predictions around a news event that together encompass the totality of possible outcomes. Think of the territory map in a role-playing game: every possible world the main character could walk into. Each branch is a predictive node. Each map names its validator and its expiry before anyone plays.

  1. 1

    Non-binary outcomes. A tournament tree, not a win or lose bet. Nobody has to take the under.

  2. 2

    Reputation is the stake. A social market, where predictive accuracy is the currency of the realm.

  3. 3

    Earned speech. Predictive success equals reach. You earn the right to a wider audience.

  4. 4

    Leagues. Institutions, private companies, public companies and individuals can hold prediction tournaments and leagues, along with the Prophets main event maps.

CAUSAL PREDICTION TREE · MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT 17EVENT DATE · 17 JULY 2014VALIDATOR · DUTCH SAFETY BOARDVALIDATED · 15 OCTOBER 2015
1 · 2 · 4Points per correct node, by round. A perfect path scores 7.
3 nodesThe Safety Board confirmed a shoot-down but not the shooter. Three outcome nodes were validated, and any of them scores.
8 to 15Maps in a season. Points accrue like a golf tour: event winners, a season champion, a sponsored purse.
05
05

prophecytwo paths

In the spirit of predicting, a prediction. Two equally probable paths lie before democratic societies.

Path 1The current path

  1. 01Institutional decline. Reports published to no effect. Two school systems, two health systems, two police forces.
  2. 02Expertise collapse. Capital for specialised knowledge drains into attention capture. All talent plays zero-sum audience games.
  3. 03Paralysis. In pandemics, disasters and attacks, cohesion fails and no meaningful response is enacted.
  4. 04Reality fracture. A dipole internet. Little shared epistemic reality across zip codes.
  5. 05Devolution. A digitally fuelled dark age, a proto-dictatorship, or a hybrid of both.

Path 2The prophets path

  1. 3 yrsWho we should ignore. A public accountability metric emerges, a ballast against hot takes and audience-capture demagoguery.
  2. 5 yrsWho we should listen to. Prophets differentiate from the pack by domain, and attention moves away from low-resolution actors.
  3. 10 yrsNew signal. Institutions, universities and companies benchmark candidates against their Prophet Score.
  4. +Shared reality. “I disagree with X politically, but they were right about Y and Z.” Junior leagues, national leagues, and a World Cup of Prophets.

We do not just want to predict the future. We want to build it.

THESIS & VISION

prophets

LET THE FUTURE DECIDE

Prediction, Competition, and the Rise of Social Markets in Web 3.0

Why our information ecosystem is failing, what is actually causing it, and how a competition-derived index built on prediction can begin to repair it.

Contents

This document is lengthy by design, written for people who want the argument in its totality. The covers the same ground in a fifth of the length, and shows what gets built.

  1. IWhat prophets are, why liberal democracy, the state of play, the ghost town
  2. IIThe complexity catastrophe and its four causal factors
  3. IIICompetition-derived indexes, why prediction, what prediction gives us
  4. IVEvent maps, the taxonomy, the two journeys, scoring, the business
  5. VTwo paths, and what happens if we are right
  6. VIGlossary and research strands
I

I · A   PROLOGUE

What are prophets?the darwinian imperative

We may know them by different names. Soothsayers, oracles, psychics, mystics, mages, seers, diviners. Whatever their label, throughout all of human history these prophet-like figures have consistently emerged across civilisations. They are individuals whose claims about the future attempt to exert some degree of leverage over their present reality. The universality of these figures, both cross-culturally and across time, raises an often overlooked but valuable question. What evolutionary purpose do they serve?

A modern empiricist lens has traditionally taken a cynical view of these future-seers, reading them as snake-oil salesmen, grifters or delusional cranks. While that holds some truth, it is short-sighted. The historical presence and persistence of these proto-oracles suggests something far more revealing. They are abstractions of the core animating feature of human cognition: the ability to accurately predict five minutes, five hours or five years into the future. And more powerfully, to be accurate for the right reasons.

Prophets can be understood as humanity's first and continued attempts at employing strategic adaptive responses to perceived threats in a noisy and often opaque information environment. They are an evolutionary by-product of the maxim that all good mental models of reality must be predictive mental models by definition. This captures the most urgent feature of all sentient life: every species, civilisation, culture and group is haunted by the same Darwinian imperative. Predict accurately or perish.

The following pages are not about resurrecting these figures. They are about reconsidering what the prophets of the 21st century can and should look like. How do we up-filter those individuals among us who can accurately predict five hours and five years out? How do we reward those who can sift through the noise and give the rest of us signal worth paying attention to?

Bottom line

The emergence of prophetic figures throughout human history is not a quaint artefact of anthropological study. It is an emergent and recursive phenomenon aimed at harnessing the most important capacity of human cognition, which is the ability to predict the future accurately.

I · B   PREFACE

Why liberal democracyto what end

The purpose of the analysis that follows is to diagnose a very complex problem at its most fundamental level while offering a viable remedy at scale. We believe we have articulated both the diagnosis and the directional solution without resorting to political analysis. In fact we go further: most political analyses of this problem are symptoms describing symptoms, camouflaged as causes. If we stay stuck in a political frame, we will only accelerate the severity of the problem.

That said, it is worth asking a teleological question at the outset. To what end are we trying to solve it? For what purpose? To answer that, we cannot avoid the political. And so everything here rests on a single political assertion.

Liberal democratic governance structures, although flawed, are the most optimally situated governance structures for the 21st century. Great care should be taken to ensure their survivability, especially among nation-states with immense military and industrial power.

If you agree with that statement on its face, skip to the state of play.

We make the assertion on four grounds

  1. Historical

    Nation-states and alliances can fail. Democracies are not durable by dint of being democracies. Democratic structures need constant attenuation and adaptation in response to environmental threats.

  2. Evolutionary

    Few other governance structures offer the adaptive advantages of liberal democracy, with self-corrective feedback built into the system itself. The information nodes of any complex system are increasing exponentially. Rigid top-down structures offer too little real-time feedback and are prone to maladaptive strategies. As complexity increases, so do the relative weaknesses of top-down governance.

  3. Practical

    The track record of liberal democracies transitioning to other structures is not promising. If they were to adopt a more top-down structure in hopes of controlling the externalities of this problem, there is little successful precedent to go on.

  4. Game theoretical

    The power vacuum during any such transition would be so long and chaotic that existing dictatorships and totalitarian regimes would amass a larger share of geopolitical power, increasing global volatility and violence in the interim.

The pages that follow refer only to the coherence and viability of these structures, and take their value as given.

I · C   STATE OF PLAY

The internet is brokenor working as designed

However one wants to define terms, there is a prevailing sense that our information ecosystem is failing us. The system by which we organise, filter and orient ourselves, individually and communally, around information is malfunctioning in profound ways.

Global democracy scores are weakening while disinformation, active-measures campaigns and synthetic media increase in sophistication and reach. Public trust in experts is at an all-time low. Local journalism is collapsing and national journalism is held hostage by click-bait and rent-seeking. We look around the globe and see political systems at their breaking points while our sense-making bodies undergo what Ian Bremmer has called an institutional recession. With recent advances in AI, the line separating reality and fiction blurs faster than those bodies can possibly track.

Liberal democracies are not suffering a crisis of trust. They are suffering a crisis of epistemology. We have lost the ability to point together at wrong things and, consequently, to cohere around right ones. From an evolutionary lens this is better described as a crisis of complexity: increasing nodes of complexity disorienting a group from knowing whether it is moving up or down an adaptive landscape. Stuart Kauffman calls this a complexity catastrophe.

The internet is broken. Or rather, the internet is behaving exactly how we designed it to behave, and that design is, in turn, breaking us.

More worrying is that we continue to underprice and misdiagnose the cause. We fail to calculate the second and third order effects of collapsing our entire social, economic, political and cultural life into one flattened marketplace whose only real currency is attention.

It stands to reason then that the internet's true disruptive element is its unrelenting and totemic compression. Entertainment, news, cat videos, religion, education, job placement, pharmaceutical ads, political campaigns, video games, sports, social signalling and dating. All of it now barters and sells inside the same digital swap-meet. Every domain competes with every other to stay relevant, and they compete for engagement and eyeballs and attention spans and little else. The sectors that have not realised this yet will, like an organism failing to adapt, slowly go extinct.

It may have been inevitable that we would build a system governed by optimisation functions that would succumb to some version of Campbell's Law: the more any quantitative indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures. The problem with engagement as that indicator is that it rewards bad behaviour while telling us very little about the relative utility of a claim. It tells us only that something is captivating.

Which means that liberal democracies, even when they can chart themselves slipping backwards on an adaptive landscape, have no way of asking, and therefore no way of answering, the questions needed to course-correct.

Bottom line

We have created a digital information ecosystem where the deepest and most elemental questions of our survival yield only one response. When asked who it is that we should listen to, Web 2.0 answers: whoever is most engaging.

I · D   THE GHOST TOWN

Two ways to buildan objective space

There is a second, quieter problem running underneath the first. Roughly two thirds of all links on the web are already dead or faulty, and the number grows. Those are digital fossils, and their decay tracks a fairly predictable curve. That much may be natural. The digital equivalent of the ecological truism that ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.

The version worth focusing on is different. The internet increasingly functions as a ghost town. An apparition approximating parts of reality without being reality. As society swaps physical interfacing, commerce and education for digital ones, the developed world is undergoing something close to the largest mass migration in human history, out of physical towns and into non-local ones. To refuse the migration is to forfeit employment, education and social status.

We are underestimating what that migration does to the individual and to democratic societies, and the objection is neurobiological rather than metaphysical. What happens when the psyche becomes untethered from the frictional boundaries of physical space? When all human communing is swapped for digital approximations? When the brain can create and control at will but cannot anchor itself to a real time and a real place? Location-centric reality is obliterated. Classrooms disappear the moment students leave them. Workspaces are infinitely manipulated and infinitely discarded. Time becomes circular, and events are neither recurrent nor ephemeral.

The cure is not a wellness app or a pharmaceutical or a deliberative process. The bulwark against the disappearance of reality is a fortified objective digital reality: a reality-based foundation people can depart from and, more importantly, return to.

Societies build objective spaces in two ways

Type 1 · Archiving

Libraries, archives and museums. In digital life, an encyclopedia is arguably the most critical objectivist anchor in the culture. If a thing is recorded there, the user knows it has existed in the world of the real and the shared. That gives two people a common epistemic space to build from, which decreases the psychological externalities of the ghost town.

Type 2 · Indexing

Competition-derived indexing. The most elemental of these were dominance hierarchies settled by violence, later abstracted into gladiatorial contest, then war. Non-violent versions are all around us: every professional league, every game, every standardised test, every performance review. These are ways cultures index people and things through agreed rules in order to reaffirm a shared objective space.

Bottom line

With respect to news and conversation inside our digital ecosystems, we are sorely in need of a competent index of the second kind. One that accurately indexes competence across time for news events.

II

II · A   COMPLEXITY CATASTROPHE

Adapt or diewolfpacks and extinction events

Consider a hypothetical. A pack of wolves occupies a local ecosystem in the Arctic. Its survivability depends entirely on its ability to track, pursue and kill local prey, and that ability rests on a host of traits, tools and environmental cues. The ability to smell prey at distance. The ability to stay warm. The ability to navigate terrain without double-tracking. Pupils that adjust to flat light in low-visibility winter landscapes. If any one of those disappeared or inverted, it would pose a serious threat to the pack's survival.

Now consider a scenario where the following happen all at once. The prey change scent. The wind reverses direction every few minutes. Snowfall grows so heavy the pack cannot make out horizon lines. The temperature drops far enough that the wolves must shelter for warmth.

A complexity catastrophe is a phenomenon where changes in the local variables of an ecosystem occur so rapidly that an organism's ability to mount an adequate adaptive response is overwhelmed, and the group dies out.

Four assertions

  1. One

    Liberal democracies are especially sensitive to, and reliant upon, the feedback loops their information ecosystem provides.

  2. Two

    Liberal democracies around the world find themselves in the midst of a complexity catastrophe with respect to those ecosystems and their ability to adapt accordingly.

  3. Three

    This complexity catastrophe rises to the level of a possible extinction event for liberal democracies if the right adaptations are not implemented quickly enough.

  4. Four

    There is a misdiagnosis of the problem, running from academia into mainstream discourse, that will all but guarantee we make the wrong adaptations.

What follows are the four contributing factors we see as causing this event. We articulate their dynamics and history, then reframe them without political or socio-cultural commentary. It is our belief that these factors sit underneath politics and influence it, rather than being influenced by it.

II · B   INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Death of the
Blue Churchcomplexity compression through institutionalism

What Blue Church architecture is

Any system that tends toward an asymmetrical, top-down information relay in order to manage an increasing complexity load.

Take rowers in a boat. As the number of rowers increases, the system hits a tipping point where the boat can only move efficiently if a coxswain coordinates the strokes. The only way to handle that increase in complexity is to stabilise the information flow. Multiple rowers cannot give commands at once, and you cannot have multiple coxswains calling for multiple boats simultaneously.

The old reality

The Industrial Revolution, on the back of the Enlightenment and the printing press, created an exponential increase in civic complexity. Liberal democracy's solution was to institutionalise its coxswains, ushering in the era of mass media. National radio, national newspapers, national and international news desks. All of it formed one-way information highways from creator to consumer, coxswain to rower. That structure held its utility from the 1870s through the early 2000s.

The new reality

The internet flattened the relay. Now all the rowers are shouting commands. All the students are talking over the teacher. Everybody is a newscaster, everybody is a radio host, and every participant is both creator and consumer at once. This wreaks havoc on a society's ability to manage complexity coherently. We do not know for certain how much democracies actually depend on top-down structures to differentiate signal from noise, and we are now finding out.

Why this matters

Blue Church architecture always had flaws, but its evolutionary advantage was that it was particularly good at inoculating a society against bad ideas inside its information silos. It made it very hard for a conspiracy theory to get traction on a mainstream outlet. Once those hierarchies are eroded, bad actors can far more easily weaponise information to undermine public trust in institutions writ large, and democracies become ripe for destabilisation, civic unrest and ultimately revolution.

This is not novel. These tactics have been employed against western democracies since the Cold War. What has changed in the last fifteen years is that their effectiveness has increased exponentially while their cost has fallen to almost nothing.

II · C   ECONOMICS

Collapse of the news
Nash equilibriuma race to the bottom

A strategy profile is a set of strategies, one for each player. Informally, it is a Nash equilibrium if no player can do better by unilaterally changing strategy.

Through the 1950s to the 1990s, national mainstream outlets operated as both an information cartel and a quasi-journalistic Nash equilibrium. If we understand news dissemination as a kind of reality approximation synthesis, all outlets occupied a de facto centre space and held each other accountable to fidelity relative to that shared approximation. Straying too far outside the field carried a cost.

In the late 1990s that soft equilibrium broke. One national network swapped reality synthesis for something closer to ideological narrative affirmation, forcing the others to abandon the equilibrium and initiating a narrative arms race. The business model moved from a clearing house for accuracy to one dominated by narrative packets as the product. Those packets did not try to capture the widest possible audience, as a traditional equilibrium model would prescribe. They aimed to consolidate a loyal audience and hold its attention as long as possible.

This was not the first time. Yellow journalism did something similar a century earlier. What was unique about this moment was that it was done institutionally, on a national scale, for engagement and advertising.

Why this matters

The point is not that there are villains and heroes in the news industry, or that industries go through booms and busts. The point is that the aggregators for information synthesis have been disoriented and dismantled, and no new healthy equilibrium exists on the horizon. From an evolutionary perspective, it is very possible we underpriced the necessity of the original equilibrium in maintaining civic cohesion.

Bottom line

Liberal, democratic news outlets have found themselves mired in a kind of price-cutting competition which, in the case of narrative confirmation, has resulted in a race to the bottom of the ideological brainstem.

II · D   PSYCHO-BIOLOGY

Parasite stress
via memesthe extended immune system

Work by evolutionary psychologists and biologists has shown that parasite stressors, meaning diseases and antigens, in a closed community aggravate what is called our extended immune system. That system activates both collectivist and authoritarian tendencies among the in-group, and it works at a biological and a psychological level at once.

Further work on memetics has shown that human brains are not particularly good at distinguishing between real parasites and ideological ones. Memes, understood as contagious antigens, can act on an individual or a group the same way a disease does. They destabilise group cohesion, activate the stress response, and shape the group's cultural and political values in reaction.

We can posit that any idea which threatens to destabilise the social cohesion of a group in turn spurs collectivist and authoritarian tendencies within it. Take a contested social question. In highly religious communities the response is to circle the wagons, double down, resist. In highly secular communities the response is to collectivise, band together, form identity tribes. The problem with social media under this theory is not that we are stuck in information silos. It is the opposite. Our ideological and axiomatic precepts are constantly under attack, which raises the likelihood that we retreat and fortify.

Why it matters

Understanding the polarisation and accelerationist trends among online communities means starting with a biological frame rather than a socio-political one. Under this frame we can reasonably assert that most efforts to persuade, teach, explain, argue or combat ideological wrong-think will not only fail, they will exacerbate the problem. It paradoxically challenges the idea that the best answer to bad speech is good speech. Ideological precepts sit underneath the reasoning centres of the brain, and there is a powerful and entirely sane counter-reaction to anything that threatens to upend them.

The more pressing issue is that this is easy to weaponise. From a psychological warfare perspective it is far easier to activate the extended immune system than to turn it off or counter-programme against it, which makes it a prime target for bad actors and for zealous actors chasing clicks.

Bottom line

Social media serves as a weaponised incubator of destabilising memes, firing thousands of viral antigens into our information ecosystem every day. By pushing these problems through a socio-political filter instead of an evolutionary one, we accelerate the severity of the very problem we are trying to solve.

II · E   GAME THEORY

The attention
capture end gametwo hidden forces

Much has already been written about the externalities of the attention-capture economy, and we do not wish to retread that work. We do want to add two causal factors we feel are overlooked with respect to their impact on liberal democracies.

One · Chaos through compression

The attention economy has caused chaos through fragmentation. That is true. But the greater disruptive threat comes from system-wide compression rather than splintering. Much of the current chaos is the logical endpoint of economically forcing all players in a market to compete for one finite resource. This is particularly dangerous for religion, government, public education, public health, granting and research, all sectors ill-equipped to compete in an attention market and especially prone to corruption or decay when forced into that reward function.

Two · Information flattening

When all information is relativised inside the same marketplace, so that news of a genocide sits beside a cat video beside an advertisement beside a sports score, a dissociative and paranoid response happens at the level of the brain. All information becomes irrelevant and hyper-salient at once.

Where this leads

We can look to countries whose governments have intentionally flattened information flows to manipulate their citizenry for clues. What we see is that people drift toward one of two outcomes.

  1. Dissociation

    People disengage into a kind of epistemological nihilism. Who is to say what the truth is? This serves as a protective mechanism against being taken advantage of, but it cedes power to those motivated to advance an agenda off the back of that indifference.

  2. Paranoia

    People display an increased propensity toward conspiratorial or anti-social behaviour. As the prioritisation schemas of society break down while narrative complexity increases, people reach for alternative explanations to rationalise otherwise complex events. This is also adaptive and self-protective. It amounts to inserting a story that makes more coherent sense than reality, in hopes of re-anchoring one's axiomatic foundations onto something.

Bottom line

An information economy predicated solely on attention capture incentivises increasingly desperate attempts to steal ever smaller slices of the public's attention. This will inevitably result in a totemic flattening of our information hierarchy, leaving the population indifferent, paranoid, or both.

II · F   SUMMARY

(A+B+C) + Dfour shifts, one event

I am now very pessimistic. I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail. We developed these institutions that made us live way above our design specifications, but we have taken them for granted, we have left them to decay, and now I think we might be at that moment in cartoons where you have run off the cliff but you have not fallen yet.Jonathan Haidt

The previous pages represent four generational shifts in how information is shaped, distributed and digested across liberal democratic societies. All four share features that dramatically influence the mechanisms by which those societies have traditionally oriented themselves around information broadly and news events narrowly. They are happening concurrently.

  1. A

    An informational shift, in how societies navigate and manage informational complexity.

  2. B

    An economic shift, in the kinds of information media and institutions filter for society and are monetarily rewarded for.

  3. C

    A biological shift, whereby mass exposure to differing ideologically rooted information increases conflict, tribalisation and authoritarian tendency at the biological level.

  4. D

    And these three have given way to a compression event, forcing all firms into a single market built around a zero-sum competition for consumer attention. That compression has flattened our informational topography and created an entirely new ecosystem in the process.

Bottom line

Taken together these phenomena comprise the core ingredients of a complexity catastrophe as it relates to democratic governance. Like the wolves, we now have very limited time to adapt before it is too late.

III

III   KEY QUESTIONS

Q

How do liberal democracies successfully adapt to this complexity catastrophe?

A

We must build a new emergent marketplace, a signaling environment, that organically differentiates adaptive information from maladaptive or irrelevant information. One that in turn helps us answer the question: who is it that we should listen to?

Q

So what does that marketplace look like?

A

Competition plus prediction.

III · A   THE SPORT OF NEWS

Everyone has a planuntil the punch lands

Mike Tyson famously quipped that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. What is captured in that statement lies at the heart of a competition-derived index. Objective spaces rely on the objective judgment of the punch, meaning the competition itself, in order to collectively weigh the merits of the plan.

Pre-fight speculation and post-fight analysis are only valuable insofar as there is an actual fight in the middle. In Tyson's case it was boxing. In a grandmaster's case it is chess. In a general's case it is the decision to invade in winter.

The problem with the current state of media is not fake news, synthetic media or click-bait headlines. Those are symptoms. The core problem is that we do not know who is actually deserving of our attention, and we do not know because there is no reliable index at play to punch those who are not.

In the absence of one, our media ecosystem around news is made up entirely of pre-game conferences, meaning baseless commentary about future events, and post-game analysis, meaning endless iteration on recent ones, with no actual fight in the middle. Only colour commentators with no athletes to comment on. And in that absence, the commentators are forced to turn to engagement as the optimisation function, which creates the second and third order externalities that shape how we orient ourselves not only to information but to reality itself.

Bottom line

What would the sport of news look like? Something like the sport of prediction. We need a fork in the conversation that pushes the colour commentators to one side and surfaces the athletes on the other.

III · B   WHY COMPETITION MATTERS

Competition-derived
indexeshow signal gets made

There are many kinds of index. A phone book is an index. The periodic table is an index. What we are focused on is the utility of a competition-derived index: an index of entities, organisms or ideas organised through competition among players and delineated by a set of shared rules and outcomes. Sports leagues, fantasy leagues, video game leagues and the Fortune 500 are all examples.

Why they matter

These indexes give rise to competence hierarchies, and competence hierarchies provide adaptive signal to participants and to society about which players and which information are worth paying attention to. The existence of the professional golf association takes what would otherwise be a subjectively unsolvable question, who is the best golfer in the world, and creates an objective and verifiable answer to it. It indexes the best golfers alive under a single competence hierarchy.

Competence hierarchies create durable signal, the kind that gives you the best chance of reorienting successfully in a new adaptive landscape during a complexity event. They imply, by their nature, fitness adaptations toward the environment as a prerequisite for moving up.

competition→indexing→competence hierarchy→signal

Signal for what?

Competition indexing is the most organic way to create valuable signal in a noisy environment. The question becomes what we actually want to create signal from. Social platforms already create signal, but it is a signal that indexes the most competent engagers, meaning those best at constructing attention-capture conceits. We have already covered the downstream consequences of that. So the logical question is what signal we are trying to tease out of the environment, if not engagement.

III · C   WHY PREDICTION MATTERS

Prediction is
the new indexthe lynchpin of cognition

The answer is the ability to predict. Not only to predict correctly, but to measure and weigh the ability to predict accurately and consistently across time.

At its core, predicting is the most elemental and complex of all human cognitive capacities. It is the lynchpin tying every other cognitive tool together. An organism that fails to predict successfully fails to replicate. Human intelligence breaks roughly into two primary domains: the ability to pattern match, meaning to assimilate, mix and synthesise patterns across domains, and the ability to predict events accurately.

Intrinsic to successful prediction is pattern matching. But pattern-matching capacity offers far lower utility to society if it fails to have predictive value. We can imagine measuring the cognitive capacity of a language model not by how cleverly it pattern-matches but by how accurately it predicts on the basis of that matching. We can imagine the inverse just as easily. Social channels are full of voices that got very good at finding what audiences wanted to hear, and whose predictive quality is zero. That is precisely the noise a new index should be actively down-regulating.

How time and prediction interact

The ability to predict farther out is directionally proportional to cognitive capacity. The further out the prediction, the greater the number of variables one must aggregate and weigh against each other across time. Consider two questions. How likely is it that a given club wins the league this season? And how likely is it that the same club wins the league next season?

The insight is that the second question is not twice as hard as the first. The addition of the extra year makes it harder by a square. The further out we move from an event, the number of variables one must consider increases proportionately with the computational capacity required to account for them accurately.

Predictive complexity over time for a single event. Cognitive capacity equals predictive accuracy multiplied by time squared.

III · D   WHAT PREDICTION GIVES US

Objectivityadjudication between worldviews

An often overlooked aspect of prediction is that it makes adjudication possible between competing worldviews and suppositions. Prediction allows an individual or a group to move from qualitative subjective rhetoric to quantitative objective outcomes.

We can measure the validity of a person's claims about the future against the future itself. That allows us to create rules and structures that might form an emergent and functional index oriented around predictive capacity and accuracy.

Why objectivity matters

Predictive validity becomes the antidote to attention capture. If the current infrastructure rewards hyperbolic or sensational qualitative statements that agitate our stress or novelty response, then transforming qualitative statements into quantitative ones gives groups objective determinations by which they can be proven correct or incorrect.

We already engage in this kind of marketplace elsewhere. The stock market and sports betting both offer validity proofs through quantitative statements. A team will beat another by four runs tonight. A share will rise four percent this quarter. Each presents as a falsifiable claim that can be litigated and whose outcome can be agreed upon.

What matters for our purposes is that the predictors in these markets need not agree on the epistemic truth of an outcome. They only need to agree on the merits of an outcome as determined by a third-party validator. In the first example that validator is the league office. In the second it is the exchange.

The key insight

Any qualitative predictive statement can, given the right prompt, be recapitulated into a quantitative one. That forces the speaker to transition an unfalsifiable statement into a falsifiable one, which in turn opens the door to making a market for it.

Qualitative

“Ukraine doesn't stand a chance against an invasion.”

Quantitative

“Kyiv falls under occupying control by (date). Validator: a named wire service.”

Qualitative

“Immigrants are taking our jobs.”

Quantitative

“How many, precisely? Which jobs, by what date? Validator: the labour statistics office.”

III · E   END GOAL

Predictive indexingthree novel avenues

Prediction becomes the forcing function that catalyses a counterweight to engagement-centric ecosystems and to bad actors' incentives to game them. Consider two versions of the same exchange.

Old internet

“Covid is nothing more than the flu.” “I disagree.” The debate does not resolve, and neither actor suffers a reputational consequence for being wrong.

New internet

“Covid is nothing more than the flu.” “I disagree. Let's make a prediction about overall mortality this year against the average of the last five. I predict a thirty percent increase in net mortality. Do you predict no significant change?”

The transition from qualitative to quantitative opens three novel avenues for stabilising our information ecosystem.

  1. One

    It turns unfalsifiable click-bait into precise, falsifiable claims about reality.

  2. Two

    It turns disagreements into open challenges. Agree to disagree becomes an open provocation with a resolution. This is a good thing.

  3. Three

    It allows the market to build a track record. An index gives us a historical record of its own makeup over time, so we can begin tracking the competence of players through ranking systems and report cards.

The goal is to build the kind of index that first requires a participant to predict the event correctly before they make qualitative statements about it.

Where this leads

As a hypothetical, imagine 250 pundits and academics made predictions about the outcome of a conflict by a given date, and only three were correct. The following year we have a rubric by which to judge who to listen to about further developments.

In the short run there is a great deal of variability with these kinds of index. Many people will be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right ones. Over time, however, the marketplace begins to up-filter those who are more right for the right reasons. Over several years the index begins to accurately reflect the competence hierarchy of the players involved.

Bottom line

This is how we reorient our information landscape over time. This is how we begin to discern who it is that we should listen to from who it is we should ignore.

III · F   THE APPETITE ALREADY EXISTS

A growing demandthe argument is already being had

The energy behind prediction as the key indicator of signal and accountability online is already visible in public conversation, and it keeps arriving at the same handful of positions. Each of them maps onto a feature of the problem laid out above.

  1. Price in wrongness

    A truth-claim marketplace has to be able to price in being wrong. Without a cost, a claim is free.

  2. No top-down verification

    Verification imposed from above will not work. It has to come from emergent, game-theoretical constraints. Which is to say, from competition indexing.

  3. Identity resists updating

    When confronted with threats to identity, status or ideology, people do not automatically update their priors. This is the parasite stress response at work.

  4. Precision as a condition

    Be precise in your claim so that we can verify its accuracy. Quantitative statements over qualitative ones.

  5. No upside to being right

    The inverse of pricing in wrongness. At present there is no accrued benefit to having been right, which is the deeper failure.

  6. Prediction first

    The root of intelligence is prediction, with pattern matching as a subset rather than the other way around.

III · G   SOLVE SUMMARY

The filterwhat the machine does

Competition-derived index+Predictions
Signal-to-noise filter
High value signal
Low value noise
Prophets worth listening to

Any solution to our complexity catastrophe cannot be top-down. It has to be both emergent and adaptive. Competition-derived indexes foster competence hierarchies that allow people to more easily differentiate who to listen to and who to tune out. A competence hierarchy based on quantitative predictive accuracy about world events captures the key features of human intelligence while allowing us to objectively validate and measure truth claims.

Takeaway

The way out of our complexity catastrophe is by way of socially mediated predictive markets.

IV

IV · A   WHAT EXISTS NOW

The rise of
prediction marketsand why they stop short

A relatively new category of platforms has emerged over the last decade that is beginning to unlock the value of prediction markets as a kind of objective ledger. Traditionally these have focused on two use cases.

Data gathering

Aggregating forecasts to harness the wisdom of crowds. The output is a probability, and the participant is an input to it.

Money markets

Trading real currency on event outcomes to create skin-in-the-game dynamics. The output is a price, and the participant is a trader.

Both are valuable and broadly applicable, and together they signal the economic and social utility of prediction markets as their own category. But both fail to adequately or intentionally address the problems set out above. The true civic and consumer potential of prediction markets is still waiting to be unleashed.

IV · B   WHY PROPHETS IS DIFFERENT

Eight departuresfrom every other prediction site

01Primacy of the individual

Most prediction markets focus on peer-to-peer betting or wisdom-of-crowds signalling. We are focused on the signal value of the individual over the group. Who is it, across time, that has the most accurate insight and should therefore be listened to above other voices in the relevant field. We want to find the Warren Buffetts of politics, technology, science, culture and current events.

02Users are not lab rats

Many prediction sites place so much emphasis on the data science gleaned from collective predictions that they sacrifice the experience, and inadvertently place the user inside a giant science experiment. For us the data is a valuable asset but not the core product. Because we do not know where genius is hidden, our job is to remove as many unhelpful barriers as possible so that genius can find us. That makes design a core pillar.

03Social markets

We are inventing a category of predictive market where the currency is reputation. Research suggests skin-in-the-game marketplaces using real money increase predictive accuracy. What social media has shown is that social signal, status signal and hierarchy jockeying are at least as motivating. Social markets combine the integrity and stakes of money markets with the dynamics, usability and virality of social platforms. Our mantra: put your reputation where your mouth is.

04A taxonomy of prediction

Events differ, but the ways they can be bet on recur. A war, an election and an outbreak all resolve along the same families of dimension. Cataloguing those families is what makes maps composable, and what lets an assistant draft one in minutes rather than weeks.

05Event mapping

A novel design invention, also called phenomenological outcome mapping, that brings the whole probability space of an event to the individual in a form they can read in a minute. It is the difference between a bet and a map of every possible world.

06Validators

Every map names, up front, the source by which it will be arbitrated and the date on which it expires, and the players vote on which candidate becomes the referee. Predictors do not have to agree about truth. They have to agree about who settles it.

07Dynamically-static scoring

How do you weigh a single event against a continuous one? A world event against a local one? An ongoing war against a terror attack? By adapting the scoring mechanics of the professional golf, surf and chess tours, we have a model that is consistent and holistic across time but flexible enough to accommodate the variability that emergent events demand.

08Earned speech

Most platforms are mired in speech and moderation problems that follow from engagement equalling reach. We invert it. Predictive success equals reach. The higher you move up the rankings, the wider your audience and the more formats you can use. You have to earn the right to a wider audience.

IV · C   EVENT MAPS

Mapping the
probability spacetwo insights from the news

Most prediction sites suffer from the same complexity constraints they set out to remedy. Predicting the future is hard. Building a product that lets a person participate in the art and science of predicting is harder. Centralising and connecting those potential outcomes is harder still. These sites are either non-intuitive, requiring long lead times to master the market dynamics, or they are too blunt to create meaningful signal on the back end.

In light of that we analysed nearly every significant news event of the last fifteen years. Two insights arose that separate us from the interface and taxonomy hurdles of other marketplaces.

  1. Insight 1

    Any given calendar year contains roughly 8 to 15 legitimate, national, newsworthy events. With few exceptions all other news through the year is iteratively or reductively anchored to those original events, often fuelled by market demands to fill ad space, column space and air time.

  2. Insight 2

    Every major event can be epistemically categorised into one of two domains. Causal news has a singular cause or origin and finite, discrete outcomes: was the crash pilot error, mechanical failure or a force majeure event? Emergent news presents a cluster of phenomenological outcomes that each lend themselves to discrete mapping: how many cases emerge, how many deaths are likely, how effective will a vaccine be, what is the disruption to the economy?

The eleven dimension families

Underneath both domains sits a shared taxonomy. These are the recurring ways any event can be bet on, and they are what an assistant walks a user through when building a map.

  • TriggerWhat starts it, and who moves first
  • MagnitudeHow many, how much, how bad
  • DurationHow long it runs, and time to each milestone
  • ThresholdWhether a stated number is crossed by a stated date
  • ActorsWho enters, who exits, who is named
  • GeographyWhere it spreads and what changes hands
  • EscalationWhether a named line is crossed
  • TerminationHow it ends, and on what terms
  • ComplianceWhether an agreement holds, and who breaks it first
  • Second orderEconomic, political and humanitarian consequences
  • VerificationWhether there is ever an agreed finding of fact
  • CounterfactualWhether the event happens at all

A map built from these is a series of if/then predictions that together encompass the totality of possible outcomes. Think of the territory map in a role-playing game: all possible worlds for the main character to walk into. Each branch is a predictive node, one question amongst many. Two clauses make it a map rather than a story: the date it expires, and the validator who arbitrates it.

SAMPLE CAUSAL MAP · MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT 17EVENT DATE · 17 JULY 2014VALIDATOR · DUTCH SAFETY BOARDVALIDATED · 15 OCTOBER 2015
1 · 2 · 4Points per correct node, by round. A perfect path scores 7.
3 nodesThe Safety Board confirmed a shoot-down but not the shooter. Three outcome nodes were validated, and any of them scores.
27Possible worlds on this map. A reader sees every one of them before the event resolves.

IV · D   TWO USER JOURNEYS

The tool and
the leaguepeer to peer, and the open tournament

Pathway 1 · the tool

Peer-to-peer prediction mapping, run like a fantasy league among friends. A user builds a map and posts it anywhere, or two users build one together to settle a disagreement and others hop in.

  1. CreateA single map: one proposition with concrete outcomes, settled between players. Single maps are the peer-to-peer format.
  2. BuildThe assistant reads the proposition and offers the dimensions it breaks into, drawn from the event taxonomy. The user keeps what is worth betting on and prunes the rest.
  3. VerifySet the two necessary clauses: when the map expires, and who validates it. Both sides agree the referee before either stakes anything.
  4. WagerThe Prophet Score is the token. Stake reputation on your own path.

Pathway 2 · the league

An open prediction tournament. The house publishes 8 to 15 maps a year on the events that matter, as they happen, using the same tools the players use.

  1. CreateEditors monitor the news and build the season's maps as grouped maps, a theme carried through several nodes. Grouped maps are the tournament format.
  2. PredictEveryone predicts inside the same window, before the map closes.
  3. VerifyEditors put an array of candidate validators to the players, who vote before the window closes.
  4. Opt outOnce validators and conditions are announced, any player may withdraw before the window closes.

IV · E   SCORING AND THE BUSINESS

How it is scored,
how it is fundedthe mechanics

Scoring

Depth is what pays. A correct node in the first round is worth one point, the second round two, the third four, so a perfect path through a three-round map scores seven. Partial paths score what they got right, which matters because validators frequently confirm more than one node. In the Malaysia Airlines case the board confirmed a shoot-down without naming the shooter, leaving three outcome nodes validated. Any of them scores.

Points accrue across a season the way they do on a golf tour. Individual maps have winners, the season has a champion, and the composite Prophet Score is drawn from both league results and peer-to-peer maps and how they fared. The model is dynamically static: consistent across time, flexible enough to weigh a single event against a continuous one.

The business

Sponsorship

A league with a season, event winners and a champion is a sponsorable property. Brand and institutional alignment with think tanks, universities and foundations follows the same logic.

Entrance fees

Competitive tiers of the tour carry an entry, in the way every other professional tour does, with the open league remaining free to enter.

Transaction fees

Peer-to-peer maps are the volume business. The tool is free to use and the platform takes a fee on the challenge.

Rollout

  1. Stage 1

    Event mapping proof. Research, design and build the first event maps, the interface, the scoring and the mapping taxonomy. Success is a handful of fully developed maps with high-fidelity research and a working platform to interact with them.

  2. Stage 2

    Platform and community. Productise the maps into a first social market, curate co-designers who will pressure-test the design and scoring, attract early predictors, and codify the taxonomy into an engine built for rapid spin-up. Success is product-market fit with early adopters across a full event run-through.

  3. Stage 3

    League launch. The equivalent of productising basketball by launching a league. Structured events, a scaled community of predictors and observers, a full first season with a champion, a scoring model that is understood and adopted, and category creation around the terms event mapping and social market.

V

V · A   PATH ONE

The current pathif nothing is corrected

In the spirit of predicting, here is our own prediction of what awaits democratic societies in the coming decades. We see two equally probable paths. The first is the status quo.

  1. 01

    Rapid institutional decline. Diminishing relevance of institutions at the civic, governmental, non-profit and educational levels. Reports and studies published to no effect or comprehension. Any comprehension failing to reach research pipelines or planning. Internal politicking and ideological adherence subsuming managerial governance. Zero-sum rent-seeking dominating funding and promotion. The public continuing to lose trust, and ideologically driven counterweights emerging that only worsen it. Two public school systems, two healthcare systems, two policing systems.

  2. 02

    Expertise silo collapse. Capital flows and incentive structures for specialised knowledge drying up and transferring into zero-sum attention capture through social platforms, podcasting and video. All talent forced into audience capture games for subscription or advertising revenue to keep the lights on. Funding for controversial or non-ideologically motivated research drying up.

  3. 03

    Democracies paralysed. In times of evolutionary stress, meaning pandemics, natural disasters, climatological events and attacks, group cohesion ceases to coalesce, incapacitating both lawmakers and institutions in their ability to enact meaningful responses or mitigate future consequences.

  4. 04

    Digital reality fracture. A dipole internet emerges where all information flows fork into tribally motivated partitions. The general public shares little to no epistemic reality across zip codes and states.

  5. 05

    Guerilla warfare and insurgency. Rapid devolution into local tribal affiliations as a hedge against environmental and political chaos. Basic social services break down. Roaming bands commit crimes against neighbours with no viable enforcement. This will not be armies lining up on battlefields but kinetic and stochastic events at varying degrees of escalation.

Bottom line

If our information ecosystem continues on its current path we can expect a digitally fuelled modern dark age, the rise of a proto-dictatorship, or a hybrid of both.

V · B   PATH TWO

The prophets pathif it is built and adopted

  1. 01

    Who we should ignore. After three years a rough public accountability metric emerges, comparable to a stock index or a restaurant rating, acting as a counterweight to hot takes and audience-capture demagoguery. Users begin to have a rough idea of which voices to ignore, and hyperbolic speech is rewarded slightly less through decreasing engagement and audience melt.

  2. 02

    Who we should listen to. At the five year mark, modern-day prophets begin to differentiate themselves from the pack relative to their expertise categories. Their individual signal increases, directing attention away from low-resolution actors. The marketplace provides an accurate report card for those whose insight into current events makes them worthy of collective public attention.

  3. 03

    New signal emerges. At the ten year mark, institutions, universities, governments and corporations begin to benchmark candidate strength against individual Prophet Scores. It becomes the single most reliable indicator of a candidate's understanding of relevant subject matter and strength of critical thinking. In the next pandemic or war or disaster, both public and private sectors have a better directory of voices to call upon.

  4. 04

    Shared reality. As scores become reliable indicators of signal value over time, partisan and ideological commitments gain viable counterweights. I may disagree with someone politically, but they were right about these two events. The rebuilding of a shared epistemology begins to surface.

  5. 05

    A new intelligentsia. Prediction making becomes culturally interesting. Schools and universities begin to incorporate prediction and pattern matching into curricula. Junior leagues and specialised niche leagues emerge to support the behaviour and the mindset.

  6. 06

    Transformation of news media. The event-mapping structure begins refocusing citizens' attention away from the deluge of daily hot takes and hysterics toward macro trends and phenomena.

  7. 07

    The new Warren Buffetts. Approximating intelligence and expertise is currently constrained by educational access, available networks and physical location. This provides an entirely meritocratic and open platform that goes straight to the heart of signal assessment. If the best predictors in the world regarding a nation's news are three sixteen-year-olds on another continent, then those are the voices that nation should be listening to.

  8. 08

    Global, national and local bonding. Leagues launch in individual countries, self-contained and germane to that country's news constructs, while a global league pools top talent around geopolitical issues. A World Cup of Prophets, where predictors represent their countries, could produce unity through division with respect to shared epistemological values and outcomes.

Bottom line

We create a competitive prediction league that is branded and franchisable, locate hidden intellectual talent globally, reclaim expertise credibility, fortify new institutions for 21st century digital life, give people their sanity back, and help save democracy in the process.

V · C   SIGN OFF

Statist and
disruptive at oncewho this is for

At its core this is as much a project of establishment as it is one of disruption.

It is statist in the sense that it asserts, a priori, the essential need for qualified experts. The need for a system that is meritocratic and accurate in locating those experts and surfacing their voices. And the need for a system that can help people agree on the validation of their expertise. Our information ecosystem as it stands, outside of the stock market and sports betting, is almost perfectly designed to ensure the opposite.

It is disruptive in the sense that many self-proclaimed establishment experts will fear it, and rightly so. Warren Buffett once quipped that it is only when the tide goes out that you discover who has been swimming naked. For those under the establishment expertise umbrella, this functions as an outgoing tide, and we suspect many will be caught without their swimsuits.

What is true for both camps is that both can agree the current track is untenable. The status quo cannot hold. A new system must be built, one capable of disrupting that which is decayed and safeguarding that which is worth preserving.

We do not just want to predict the future. We want to build it.
VI

VI · A   GLOSSARY

Key terms

Event map
A series of if/then predictions around a news event that together encompass the totality of possible outcomes.
Predictive node
A single predictive question within an event map. One question amongst many.
Validator
The source by which a map is arbitrated: a regulator, an institution, a set of outlets, a journal, an official statement.
Causal news
An event with a singular origin and a finite, discrete set of outcomes.
Emergent news
An event presenting a cluster of phenomenological outcomes, each of which can be mapped.
Social market
A market whose currency is reputation rather than money. Credibility is wagered, won and lost.
Competition-derived index
An index organised through competition under shared rules. The mechanism that turns arguments into rankings.
Competence hierarchy
The ordering an index produces, and the durable signal it gives to everyone outside it.
Blue Church architecture
Any system that manages a rising complexity load through an asymmetrical, top-down information relay.
Complexity catastrophe
When local variables change faster than an organism can mount an adaptive response.
Prophet Score
A composite of league results and peer-to-peer maps. A public measure of predictive capacity over time.
Earned speech
Reach and publishing rights that scale with predictive success rather than engagement.

VI · B   RESEARCH STRANDS

What this rests on

The argument draws on three bodies of work. The full citation list travels with the appendix of the original vision deck.

Declining institutional trust

Longitudinal survey work on public confidence in institutions, and the analyses of collapsing trust that follow from it.

Complexity theory

Kauffman on complexity catastrophes and fitness landscapes, and the organisational science that applies those models to human systems.

Prediction markets

The academic review of election betting markets, forecasting accuracy, and the experimental work on improving the wisdom of crowds by asking people to predict the vote rather than cast it.

We do not just want to predict the future. We want to build it.

prophets

LET THE FUTURE DECIDE

Who should we listen to?

Prophets is an information ecosystem governed not by attention and clicks but by predictive prowess, competition and accountability. Map the future, put your reputation on a path, and let the validator decide.

Network snapshot
01

The problem

The problemAttention is not judgment.

We live in a world of noise, and the internet confuses visibility with truth. We built a system that rewards volume, not wisdom, so truth gets lost in the crowd.Prophets rewards the one thing that can be checked against reality: the record.

Put your reputation where your mouth is. If you feel so strongly about it, make a prediction. The future will decide who is right.

02

The system

Seven steps, one loop. Every map runs through it; every player is scored by it.

  1. MapAn event becomes a tree of every possible outcome.
  2. VerifyName the validator and the date the map expires.
  3. PredictPlayers pick a path, round by round, before the window closes.
  4. StakeReputation is on the line, not money.
  5. ResolveThe validator decides. Outcomes are measured objectively.
  6. ScoreDeeper correct nodes earn more. Signal earns trust; noise earns friction.
  7. RankThe best rise and earn reach. The rest fade.
03

Three expressions of the same system

04

Event maps

Open maps close on a date and name their validator up front. Pick a path; the crowd's distribution is public.

Grouped map · TournamentNode 1 of 5 · closes in 12 daysLive

Will the central bank cut its policy rate before July?

Yes, by 25 bp
46%
Yes, by 50 bp or more
9%
No change
38%
A rise
7%
1,204Players
2Rounds
Player voteValidator
30 JunResolves
The rate cycle, mapped · proposed by the house
Single map · Peer to peerCloses in 3 daysLive

What caused the undersea cable break?

Bad actor
52%
Accident (anchor drag)
31%
Natural event
6%
Indeterminate
11%
668Players
3Rounds
Player voteValidator
90 daysExpiry
Challenge from Kofi Mensah · Tier V
ARCHIVE MAP · MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT 17VALIDATOR · DUTCH SAFETY BOARDPLAY IT · PICK ONE NODE PER ROUND

Your path

  • Round 1pick a cause·
  • Round 2then an actor·
  • Round 3then a mechanism·

Stake

0/7points at stake

Round 1 is worth 1 point, Round 2 is worth 2, Round 3 is worth 4. Resolve to see what the Safety Board confirmed.

05

Build a map

Every event breaks into dimensions you can bet on. Name the subject, and the assistant lays out the taxonomy. Snap on the dimensions that matter, prune the outcomes you think are dead, and the map is built.

The board

0Dimensions
0Live outcomes
0Possible worlds
0Points available
06

Scoring

Dynamically static: consistent across time, flexible enough for emergent events. Four things move a Prophet Score.

Accuracy

Share of picked nodes the validator confirmed, across every map played.

Depth

Average round reached correctly. Round 3 pays four times Round 1.

Horizon

Time-weighting: a call made a year out counts for more than one made a week out.

Consistency

Seasons finished in the top ten percent. The index up-filters those right for the right reasons.

1 · 2 · 4Points per correct node by round. A perfect path scores 7; partial paths score what they got right.
Any of 3When a validator confirms more than one node, as the Safety Board did for MH17, any confirmed node scores.
P2P + leagueThe Prophet Score is a composite: peer-to-peer maps and how they fared, plus open-league results.
07

Public records of judgment

Ruth Adeyemi ✓

“Read the base rate before the headline.”

JoinedSeason 1
TierIV · Analyst
LocationLagos
FocusPublic health, economics
Best finish1st · season 2, map 7
Current rank3 of 4,812
All domainsPublic healthEconomicsGeopoliticsTechnology
1,482Prophet score
#3Season rank
71%Accuracy
27Maps played
Map 9 · closed
Will the central bank cut rates before March?
Picked No change
Correct +3
Map 8 · closed
What caused the refinery outage?
Picked Mechanical → Pump failure
Partial +3 of 7
Map 7 · closed
How many named storms make landfall?
Picked Three or more
Correct +7
Map 6 · closed
Will the vaccine trial report efficacy above 70%?
Picked Yes
Incorrect 0
P2P · vs K. Mensah
Which port reopens first?
Picked The southern port
Correct +100 rep
SeasonMapsValidatedPointsFinish
Season 3 · current97543rd
Season 2128612nd
Season 1642941st

Career summary

Maps played
27
Nodes validated
19 of 27
Top-10% finishes
3
Maps won
2
Peer-to-peer record
14 wins, 6 losses
Reach
Home-page eligible
Economics

No recession begins before the second quarter of next year.

What would change my mindTwo consecutive quarters of negative real growth, or unemployment above 5.5%.

Public health

The next respiratory season peaks later and lower than the last three.

What would change my mindA novel variant with a measurable escape from prior immunity by October.

Geopolitics

The ceasefire holds through the year, with violations but no collapse.

What would change my mindA named, attributed strike on either capital.

Technology

No frontier model is withdrawn from public release for safety reasons this year.

What would change my mindA regulator-ordered withdrawal in any major market.

Ruth Adeyemi Tier IV · 2h

Staking 100 on “no change” for the rate map. The last four cutting cycles all began with a communications shift a meeting earlier, and there hasn't been one. Evidence I'm watching: the minutes language on labour slack.

↳ Will the central bank cut its policy rate before July?
Ruth Adeyemi Tier IV · yesterday

Built a grouped map for the storm season. Five nodes, validator is the national hurricane centre's end-of-season report. Open challenge to anyone who thinks fewer than three landfalls.

↳ The hurricane season, mapped
08

What if reach had to be earned?

Prophets builds a world where influence is earned through verified judgment. The more signal you produce, the more reach you unlock. That governs which formats you can use and how far they travel.

Everyone starts in the open league. Nobody is given an audience; everyone can earn one.

  1. V · ProphetPropose league maps and vote on validators.Network-wide
  2. IV · AnalystPublish long-form analysis.Home-page eligible
  3. III · CartographerBuild and share peer-to-peer maps.Followers of followers
  4. II · ReaderPost to your feed.Followers
  5. I · InitiatePredict on open maps. Earn your first score.Open to all
09

Common questions

The rules that decide the arguments people have about a prediction system before they will play in one.

Who decides the validator?

The bettors do. Every map ships with an array of candidate validators and the players vote before the window closes. Nobody plays a map whose referee they did not agree to.

How does partial resolution score?

Any node the validator confirms scores at its round value. The Dutch Safety Board confirmed a shoot-down without naming the shooter, so three outcome nodes were validated and a player on any of them was paid.

Are positions public?

Yes. A prophet's standing positions are public, including the evidence they say would change their mind. A record nobody can inspect is not a record.

Single map or grouped map?

Single maps are for peer-to-peer challenges: one proposition, settled between players. Grouped maps are the tournament format, a theme carried through several nodes across a season.